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R600 Open-Source Driver WIth GLSL, OpenGL 2.0

12-19-2009, 08:40 AM

Phoronix: R600 Open-Source Driver WIth GLSL, OpenGL 2.0

If Catalyst 9.12 for Linux and its changes didn't deliver on what you wanted for your Christmas wishes, perhaps this change to their open-source driver does deliver on one of your hopes. The ATI R600/700 open-source 3D stack should now be OpenGL 2.0 compatible (compared to OpenGL 1.5 previously) and the GLSL (GL Shading Language) support should be "mostly" completed. AMD's Richard Li recently introduced a commit that enables GL2 and there has been other AMD/ATI 3D work going on too...

Comment

Sooo.. just to sum it up: R600+ can choose between radeon and fglrx if they want (useable) 3d accel (--> GLSL) and <=R500 users have to use an old fglrx? Is this correct? *THUMBS UP* to ATi.. definately my last ati/amd board..

Comment

Shouldn't Gallium Core Drive for R600-R800 be changed from TODO to WIP? That is what VMware is working on, right?

AFAIK the VMWare folks are primarily working on (a) the Gallium3D driver for their emulated SVGA hardware, and (b) the non-driver portions of the Gallium3D framework (ie Mesa, Xorg, GL, VG, CL etc... state trackers along with refining the internal APIs).

Corbin (MostAwesomeDude) mentioned that he was starting on a Gallium3D driver for 6xx-8xx but that's all I have heard. Richard is looking forward to working on Gallium3D as well; best guess is that will happen after (a) some testing / fixing on 6xx-7xx GLSL, and (b) getting inital 3D engine support working on Evergreen.

I suspect it's still treated as "WIP" because the first patches are just working their way into the kernel tree now and haven't had much general testing there. It probably is coming up on time to switch to "Mostly" though...

Sooo.. just to sum it up: R600+ can choose between radeon and fglrx if they want (useable) 3d accel (--> GLSL) and <=R500 users have to use an old fglrx? Is this correct? *THUMBS UP* to ATi.. definately my last ati/amd board..

Huh ? Where are you getting that ?

GLSL was enabled in the Gallium3D driver for 3xx-5xx *before* it was enabled in the classic mesa driver for 6xx-7xx. Neither one is ready for general use yet, both are being tested and fixed. Richard enabled GLSL so that application testing could *start* (including making sure that enabling GLSL didn't cause previously working games to break), not because the work was *finished*.